Joseph Wambaugh - Hollywood Crows

Bix, his mini-flashlight on the asphalt, was down on his knees, crawling under the car, trying to lift the portion of wreckage that had the child pinned. Ronnie could hear him grunting and saw him lifting with his back, and when she shined her light under the car, she lit the face of a four-year-old girl who turned out to be the second daughter of young Cambodian immigrants who had been in Hollywood for nearly five years.

The child’s body was twisted and bloody, but her face and head were unmarked. She had a delicate, very pale beauty, and Ronnie crawled under the wreckage to help Bix try to lift the twisted metal.

It was then that the thing happened, the thing that Ronnie knew she’d remember for the rest of her career. Perhaps for the rest of her days. The little girl opened her eyes and looked directly into the straining face of Bix Ramstead, who had at last raised the chunk of wreckage high enough for Ronnie to pull her free.

Just before Ronnie grabbed her, the child said to Bix, “Are you my angel?”

Controlling his labored breathing, Bix managed to say, “Yes, darling, I am your angel.”

When they got back to Hollywood Station, Bix changed out of his uniform much faster than Ronnie did. When she left the women’s locker room she saw him sprinting across the parking lot to his minivan, and she was pretty sure she knew where he was going.

After Ronnie arrived at work the next morning, she learned that the child had survived the ambulance ride to Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center but died in the ER moments before her angel came running to her side.

ONCE A MONTH every patrol division of the LAPD was required to hold a CPAB meeting, pronounced see-pab , for Community Police Advisory Board. Hollywood Division held its CPAB meeting on the last Tuesday, the idea being to bring together community leaders, neighborhood watch captains, the City Attorney’s Office, the Department of Transportation, the L.A. Fire Department, and others, all to discuss crime and quality-of-life issues in the respective police divisions. The meeting was run by the division captain along with the CPAB president, whoever that might be.

The problems began almost immediately for the Hollywood Division CRO because, according to unofficial reports to the office of the chief of police, Hollywood was not like anywhere else. In fact, the unofficial report referred to Hollywood as “America’s kook capital.” Because it was a community meeting, residents of Hollywood could not be segregated or excluded due to irrational behavior, unless the behavior turned dangerous. Many of the same people showed up regularly at the meetings for free coffee and donuts. And, more often than not, havoc ensued.

Special arrangements had to be made to accommodate the Hollywood Division CPAB meetings, and it was decided that a second meeting would be held the day after the official CPAB meeting. The names and addresses of the more peculiar and troublesome residents were culled from sign-in sheets at the CPAB meetings, and letters were sent telling them that their meetings would now be held on the last Wednesday of the month. The Wednesday gathering was officially renamed the “Hollywood Community Meeting.” But the cops unofficially referred to it as the “Cuckoo’s Nest.”

Crows would say to one another, “Are you going to CPAB or Cuckoo’s Nest?”

The Cuckoo’s Nest meeting was not run by the captain or any member of the command staff. Sometimes even the CRO sergeant wasn’t in charge, preferring to leave it to one of the senior lead officers. The Crow would try to arrange for interesting guest speakers, such as a narcotics detective or a gang officer or a vice cop. In order to entice speakers, the Crow told them that this was a very low-key community meeting that the speakers would find enjoyable. Once the speakers discovered the truth, they never came back.

Ronnie Sinclair was tasked to assist at her first Cuckoo’s Nest meeting the day after Jetsam became convinced that he might have stumbled onto an al Qaeda cell operating in Hollywood. Jetsam had phoned the auto theft team the moment he woke up that morning, but they were in court or otherwise occupied and away from the station. When one of them finally returned his call, the detective, whom Jetsam didn’t know personally, was less than enthusiastic.

After hearing Jetsam’s terrorist theory based upon spotting one Arabic newspaper at a body shop that worked on expensive SUVs, the detective said to him, “Do you know Arabic from Farsi?”

“Well, no,” Jetsam had to admit.

“The newspaper could have been left there by an Iranian,” the detective suggested.

“All the more reason to check it out,” Jetsam said. “Remember the case last year where LAPD and the FBI popped those Chechens who had a racket where they got people to report expensive cars stolen and collect insurance payoffs? And then the cars were smuggled in big shipping containers to their country to help Muslim terrorists? Remember that one? Well, these SUVs were too newish and expensive to be worked on in a repair joint in East Hollywood.”

The detective was silent for a moment and then said, “Are you saying you think these people are Chechen terrorists?”

“No, but maybe they’re copycats pulling the same scam, and they’re gonna smuggle hot SUVs to places like…”

“Baghdad?”

“Or like…”

“Tehran?”

“Aw, shit,” Jetsam said.

“You have my blessing if you wanna check it out yourself,” the detective said. “But you catch ’em, you clean ’em. Right now I’m due in court, so I gotta run.”

After hanging up, Jetsam said to the phone, “And we thank you for your call. Fuck you very much.”

Detective indifference and condescension is what brought Jetsam and his reluctant partner to the Cuckoo’s Nest meeting on Wednesday night. Of course it was a bonus for Ronnie Sinclair to observe a meeting conducted by an experienced Crow. The sergeant told Ronnie that Tony Silva would be a good one to emulate because he was patient and had a calming effect on most of the regulars if things turned violent.

“Violent?” Ronnie said in astonishment, but her sergeant only shrugged and walked away. She thought he must be kidding.

Twenty minutes before the Cuckoo’s Nest was to start, Ronnie was surprised to see Jetsam enter the meeting room and wave her outside.

“What’s up?” she said, walking with him to the black-and-white, where Flotsam sat behind the wheel.

Flotsam looked out at her and said, “Don’t blame me for this, Ronnie. Watch five only has three cars in the field tonight and he’s got me beached. If Treakle finds out, he’ll have us castrated.”

“I got something for a Crow to check out, Ronnie,” Jetsam said, giving her a piece of notebook paper with the address of the auto body shop and the address and phone number of the Guatemalan woman who phoned about their cars blocking the alley.

“What’s all this?” she said.

“It’s a quality-of-life deal,” Jetsam said. “And it’s an opportunity for you to go to this body shop and maybe, just maybe, end up with something pretty big.”

“It’s Osama bin Laden,” Flotsam said. “My pard thinks he’s there, pounding out dents on Beemers and Benzes.”

“Dude, can you stop hacking on me for two minutes?” Jetsam said to his partner. “You’re spiking me like you spiked those barneys at Malibu this morning.”

Ronnie, who knew that Flotsam and Jetsam surfed almost every day before going on duty, said, “Spiking? Barneys?”

Flotsam said, “He thinks I shouldn’t do surfboard self-defense on four squids that flipped us off and stole my juicies when I was rippin’. They thought it was cooleo till one of them caught my log upside his head when I snaked him on the next wave.”